LinuxCon and the Promise of CloudOpen

By Sean Michael Kerner | August 28, 2012

From the 'Open Source Conference Preview' files:

SAN DIEGO. The fourth annual LinuxCon conference is getting underway this week here in Sunny San Diego. Over the last four years, LinuxCon USA has emerged as one of the preeminent Linux events on Earth, bringing together the best and brightest in a weeklong Linux love-in.

LinuxCon filled the gap that was left behind after the collapse of LinuxWorld (remember that show?) as a vastly superior, technology focused show. The 2012 event by all indications will be another epic bonanza for Linux aficionados. While there have always been co-located conferences at LinuxCon, this year the Linux Foundation is co-locating its newest conference CloudOpen with LinuxCon.

No surprise there really. The cloud – like the core internet hosting space before it – is set to be dominated by Linux. Just as Apache, since the very beginning of the web era (and for most of that on Linux too) has dominated web serving, Linux and open source tech are set to dominate the new cloud era.

Among the big name speakers that I'm really looking forward to hearing from at CloudOpen/LinuxCon 2012 is Jonathan Bryce. Bryce is one of the founders of OpenStack, an effort that has broad support from every major Linux vendor.

One the core Linux front, the highlight for many people (myself included) is undoubtedly likely to be none other than Linus Torvalds. Torvalds will be joined on stage as part of a keynote panel discussion with fellow kernel developers Greg Kroah-Hartman, Ted Ts'o and James Bottomley.

The other high-level big Linux sessions that I'm looking forward too include a keynote from Red Hat's Tim Burke on Enterprise Linux success factors. I'd suspect that Red Hat has at least a billion ($) factors that it can talk about.

Red Hat's rival Oracle will also be talking about Linux success in a keynoted titled, Linux Tales from the Trenches of an Ultra Demanding Cloud Data Center. That session will be led by Oracle's top Linux guy Wim Coekaerts, SVP, Linux and Virtualization Engineering, Oracle who will be joined by Mark Sunday, Senior VP and CIO of Oracle.

While all those talks I've listed above are likely to be interesting, in my opinion, there is no single topic in the Linux world today that is more contentious than that of Secure Boot. A key figure in the Secure Boot discussion is Red Hat engineer Matt Garret and he'll be leading a session titled, 'Linux in a UEFI Secure Boot World'. It's a session that is likely to be a hotbed of conversation.

Facebook and Twitter

Last but not least, I'm personally really looking forward to two specific talks about open source in action. Facebook engineer Amir Michael is set to deliver a keynote on the Open Compute Project and making hardware more open. Twitter Open Source Manager Chris Aniszczyk is set to talk about the open source technology behind a tweet.

So yeaah, a busy week ahead with no shortage of Linux loving open source cloud goodness.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.